This Fall, Behance held our second annual in-house Hackathon. The API was used in very creative ways, and the day was filled with some amazing ideas, collaboration and participation from both the Behance team and some special guests.

Here is a list of some great ideas that came to life:

BeSpoke:A suggestion engine tailored to your tasteBeSynth: A synthesizer that maps dominant colors of user projects to audio frequency, modulated by touch.CAS3G: 3D globe of published Behance projectsBehance Mood BoardBehance Hue Lights: Hue lighting based on the average color of a project coverBehance Data MiningBeMix: Creative mosaics powered by BehanceBettle: A battle game based on your Behance statsAssisthance: Voice control…for everyone

This post is part of a series where Behance developers talk about the various tools they use to get things done and make ideas happen.

1. Who are you and what do you do at Behance?

Hello, I’m Chris Fortier and I am the Lead Quality Engineer at Behance. My main responsibility is to help guide the Quality Engineering Team so that we can figure out how to test all the various aspects of our websites. I’ve been on the team for a year now (I know, I’ve slacked off on writing this post) and I’ve been involved in quite a few projects. The first major project that I worked on was an automated process to build a replica of our production environments so that we can have a more effective development and testing process. These environments are built on VirtualBox and OpenStack virtual machines. For the past several months I’ve been working very closely with the DevOps team as we adopt Chef and standardize our infrastructure as code. Looking forward to 2014, we are in the process of a complete overhaul of our testing infrastructure and busy trying to figure out how to build a Continuous Deployment process. Stay tuned for details.Read more →

We asked our members to share their Work-In-Progress with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BehanceWIP, and we saw some amazing things happening. Now that we’ve entered the new year, we would love for you to continue to share what you are currently working on.

It’s been an amazing year here at Behance and we’re so excited for what we have in store for the coming year. We’re constantly in awe of the work that you, the creative world, can turn out. You all help make life more interesting.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a look back at 2013 and featuring some of our staff’s favorite projects from the past year at facebook.com/Behance while we recount our Top Tweets at twitter.com/Behance, so be sure to follow along!

1) What was your inspiration for this project?Following Domestic’s “modus operandi” and working as a creative laboratory, we try to focus on new visualization methods. There was a significant evolution between the first project -where we worked two-dimensionally- and the last one. It was conceptually designed to take place in one of the rooms in the Moritz factory, an old beer factory remodeled under the instructions of Jean Nouvel. You can imagine what a challenge it was for us!

We were interested in translating votes into a piece of work that had a relevant presence in the. Our intention was to generate a dynamic data stream that was reordered and created a tridimensional graphic—which was a literal bar chart.

How long have you been in design?I’ve been designing since High School and started freelancing around that time but didn’t really take it serious as my career until about 5 years ago. Total years designing has been 10 years.

Do your personal projects differ from your professional work? If yes, how so?They do tend to be different. I currently work full-time for Disney where my current role requires me to design and illustrate training materials. My freelance/personal work is very stylistically different and tends to be the work I am most passionate about. All my work outside of Disney tends to nod back to the earlier design era where illustration was king and it all had a handcrafted look.

What do you think are the most important elements to focus on, when creating a personal website?The most important thing to me is that who you are and the type of work you want to be doing is proudly displayed. In the past I would literally post anything and everything I was working on….even if it sucked. I was so caught up on making it look like I had a lot of work that I started getting the wrong kind of inquires. It wasn’t until I stripped down my site and dropped all the garbage that I began to get the kind of work I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. Your site needs to give someone a snapshot of your passion for art and your skills within seconds or you will lose them.

Here in New York, the Behance team is just getting back from Thanksgiving. We had a ton to be thankful for this year and it’s always great to hear success stories from our members.

Michael Robertson is the Director of Toon53 Productions in Johannesburg, South Africa where he collaborates with illustrators Kenneth Doust and Dean Ira. In August, one of the team’s projects, ‘The Weird World of Nox and Harper’ was featured on Motion Graphics served. For Toon53, it was a big moment to say the least.

“I joined Behance in 2009 – at the time I was joining as many sites as possible for exposure – uploaded a few old works and didn’t really do much for a good few years. Fast forward around 3 and a half years to a few weeks ago when I decided to update my portfolio start applying to different jobs around the world on Behance and WOW is all I can say. We’re based in sunny South Africa and are currently working for a company in Moscow, another in the US, one in Dubai and a handful here locally all thanks to Behance!!

Showcase your Behance Portfolio anywhere, even without an internet connection.

Here’s what else you can expect:
- Download all of your existing Behance projects
- Display your work, even without an internet connection
- Customize your portfolio – decide what work to show and how to show it